ABSTRACT
This story begins with my (EJM) convincing Roddy to take me on as a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University, based on my dissertation on the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) memory illusion (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). As all memory researchers now know, the DRM illusion involves presenting people with a list of associated words (e.g., bed, rest, awake, tired, …) and examining false recall and false recognition of a critical lure (e.g., sleep) that is associated to all of the studied items (see McDermott, chapter 18, this volume). In my dissertation, I argued that a reality monitoring error (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993) played a role in the illusion (Marsh & Bower, 2004). Although my dissertation experiments on DRM were what helped convince Roddy to take me on, I only conducted one experiment on the DRM illusion during my time in St Louis, on the role of testing in creating the illusion (Marsh, McDermott, & Roediger, 2004). Rather, almost as soon as I arrived in St Louis, I began a new line of research that combined my interests in source memory (e.g., Marsh & Bower, 1999) with my personal love of literature. Always willing to try new things, Roddy agreed I could stray from DRM to create a paradigm for studying learning from fiction.
